VIETNAM WAR
VETERAN JOHN KERRY'S TESTIMONY BEFORE THE SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS
COMMITTEE, APRIL 22, 1971

Editorial
Notes by Dr. Ernest Bolt, University of Richmond

By April 1971, with at least seven
legislative proposals relating to the Vietnam war under consideration,
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chaired by Senator William
Fulbright (Democrat-Arkansas) began to hear testimony. On the
third day of hearings, six members of the committee heard comments
by John Kerry, a leader of the major veterans organization opposing
continuation of the war. Kerry was the only representative of
Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) who testified on April
22, but others in VVAW were in the audience and at times supported
his remarks with applause.

The committee began the hearing
April 20 and continued to receive testimony for four days in April
and for seven days throughout May, 1971. The full testimony heard
by the committee, including that of Kerry, is in Legislative Proposals
Relating to the War in Southeast Asia, Hearings before the Committee
on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, Ninety-Second Congress,
First Session (April-May 1971), Washington: Government Printing
Office, 1971. Subject breaks in Kerry's testimony were provided
by the Senate staff in the form of subtitles, which in some cases
are retained below. Additional editorial notes are provided by
Professor Bolt. Excerpts from Kerry's testimony are from pages
180, 181-183, 184, 185, 195, 204, and 208.

Statement
of Mr. John Kerry

...I am not here as John Kerry.
I am here as one member of the group of 1,000 which is a small
representation of a very much larger group of veterans in this
country, and were it possible for all of them to sit at this table
they would be here and have the same kind of testimony....

WINTER SOLDIER INVESTIGATION

I would like to talk, representing
all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit,
we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged
and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes
committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes
committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers
at all levels of command....

They told the stories at times
they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped
wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up
the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians,
razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle
and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged
the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage
of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done
by the applied bombing power of this country.

We call this investigation the
"Winter Soldier Investigation." The term "Winter
Soldier" is a play on words of Thomas Paine in 1776 when
he spoke of the Sunshine Patriot and summertime soldiers who deserted
at Valley Forge because the going was rough.

We who have come here to Washington
have come here because we f eel we have to be winter soldiers
now. We could come back to this country; we could be quiet; we
could hold our silence; we could not tell what went on in Vietnam,
but we feel because of what threatens this country, the fact that
the crimes threaten it, not reds, and not redcoats but the crimes
which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak
out.

FEELINGS OF MEN COMING
BACK FROM VIETNAM

...In our opinion, and from our
experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam, nothing which could
happen that realistically threatens the United States of America.
And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam,
Cambodia, or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of
freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height
of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which
we feel has torn this country apart....

WHAT WAS FOUND AND LEARNED
IN VIETNAM

We found that not only was it
a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking
their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but also
we found that the Vietnamese whom we had enthusiastically molded
after our own image were hard put to take up the fight against
the threat we were supposedly saving them from.

We found most people didn't even
know the difference between communism and democracy. They only
wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them
and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their
country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly
with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to
leave them alone on peace, and they practiced the art of survival
by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular
time, be it Vietcong, North Vietnamese, or American.

We found also that all too often
American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support
from their allies. We saw first hand how money from American taxes
was used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people
in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by our
flag, as blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties.
We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs as well as by
search and destroy missions, as well as by Vietcong terrorism,
and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the
havoc on the Viet Cong.

We rationalized destroying villages
in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality
as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the
image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing
gum.

We learned the meaning of free
fire zones, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while
America placed a cheapness on the lives of orientals.

We watched the U.S. falsification
of body counts, in fact the glorification of body counts. We listened
while month after month we were told the back of the enemy was
about to break. We fought using weapons against "oriental
human beings," with quotation marks around that. We fought
using weapons against those people which I do not believe this
country would dream of using were we fighting in the European
theater or let us say a non-third-world people theater, and so
we watched while men charged up hills because a general said that
hill has to be taken, and after losing one platoon or two platoons
they marched away to leave the high for the reoccupation by the
North Vietnamese because we watched pride allow the most unimportant
of battles to be blown into extravaganzas, because we couldn't
lose, and we couldn't retreat, and because it didn't matter how
many American bodies were lost to prove that point. And so there
were Hamburger Hills and Khe Sanhs and Hill 881's and Fire Base
6's and so many others.

VIETNAMIZATION

Now we are told that the men who
fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost
so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing
the Vietnamese....

Each day to facilitate the process
by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone
has to give up his life so that the United States doen'st have
to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that
we can't say they we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so
that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the
first President to lose a war."

We are asking Americans to think
about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to
die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die
for a mistake? But we are trying to do that, and we are doing
it with thousands of rationalizations, and if you read carefully
the President's last speech to the people of this country, you
can see that he says and says clearly:

But the issue, gentlemen, the
issue is communism, and the question is whether or not we will
leave that country to the Communists or whether or not we will
try to give it hope to be a free people.

But the point is they are not
a free people now under us. They are not a free people, and we
cannot fight communism all over the world, and I think we should
have learned that lesson by now....

REQUEST FOR ACTION BY
CONGRESS

We are asking here in Washington
for some action, action from the Congress of the United States
of America which as the power to raise and maintain armies, and
which by the Constitution also has the power to declare war.

We have come here, not to the
President, because we believe that this body can be responsive
to the will of the people, and we believe that the will of the
people says that we should be out of Vietnam now....

WHERE IS THE LEADERSHIP?

We are also here to ask, and we
are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country?
Where is the leadership? We are here to ask where are McNamara,
Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatric, and so many others. Where are they now
that we, the men whom they sent off to war, have returned? These
are commanders who have deserted their troops, and there is no
more serious crime in the law of war. The Army says they never
leave their wounded.

The Marines say they never leave
even their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated
behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They have left the
real stuff of their reputations bleaching begin them in the sun
in this country....

Editorial Note: Concluding his formal statement, Kerry
commented about administration attempts to disown veterans and
looked forward thirty years (to 2001) when the nation could look
back proudly to a time when it turned from this war and the hate
and fears driving us in Vietnam.

Following his formal testimony,
the committee members questioned him during their discussion of
some of the legislative proposals under consideration. In the
course of this discussion, Kerry spoke with considerable familiarity
and understanding about disengagement and withdrawal proposals
being considered. In response to a question from Senator Aiken,
Kerry endorsed "extensive reparations to the people of Indochina"
as a "very definite obligation" of the U.S. (p. 191).
Kerry also commented on growth of American opposition to the war,
the actions of Lt. Calley at My Lai, and strategic implications
of the war.

...It is my opinion that the United
States is still reacting in very much the 1945 mood and postwar
cold-war period when we reacted to the forces which were at work
in World War II and came out of it with this paranoia about the
Russians and how the world was going to be divided up between
the super powers, and the foreign policy of John Foster Dulles
which was responsible for the created of the SEATO treaty, which
was, in fact, a direct reaction to this so-called Communist monolith.
And I think we are reacting under cold-war precepts which are
no longer applicable.

I say that because so long as
we have the kind of strike force we have, and I am not party to
the secret statistics which you gentlemen have here, but as long
as we have the ones which we of the public know we have, I think
we have a strike force of such capability and I think we have
a strike force simply in our Polaris submarines, in the 62 or
some Polaris submarines, which are constantly roaming around under
the sea. And I know as a Navy man that underwater detection is
the hardest kind in the world, and they have not perfected it,
that we have the ability to destroy the human race. Why do we
have to, therefore, consider and keep considering threats?

At any time that an actual threat
is posed to this country or to the security and freedom I will
be one of the first people to pick up a gun and defend it, but
right now we are reacting with paranoia t this question of peace
and the people taking over the world. I think if were are ever
going to get down to the question of dropping those bombs most
of us in my generation simply don't want to be alive afterwards
because of the kind of world that it would be with mutations and
the genetic probabilities of freaks and everything else.

Therefore, I think it is ridiculous
to assume we have to play this power game based on total warfare.
I think there will be guerrilla wars and I think we must have
a capability to fight those. And we may have to fight them somewhere
based on legitimate threats, but we must learn, in this country,
how to define those threats and that is what I would say to the
question of world peace. I think it is bogus, totally artificial.
There is no threat. The Communists are not about to take over
our McDonald hamburger stands.
[Laughter.]...

Editorial Note: Kerry's exchange with the senators consumed
two complete hours, ranging from earlier French experiences in
Indochina to the status of the war in 1971. Kerry faulted the
electronic press for failure to report a recent antiwar conference
because of its lack of "visual" appeal and entertainment
value. He also cited the "exorbitant" power of the Executive,
faulting Congress.

In response to Senator Symington's
inquiry about American men and women still in Vietnam and their
attitude toward opposition to the war within Congress, Kerry offered
the following comments.

...I don't want to get into the
game of saying I represent everybody over there, but let me try
to say as straightforwardly as I can, we had an advertisement,
ran full page, to show you what the troops read. It ran in Playboy
and the response to it within two and a half weeks from Vietnam
was 1,200 members. We received initially about 50 to 80 letters
a day from troops arriving at our New York office. Some of these
letters -- and I wanted to bring some down, I didn't know we were
going to be testifying here and I can make them available to you
-- are very, very moving, some of them written by hospital corpsmen
on things, on casualty report sheets which say, you know, "Get
us out of here." "You are the only hope he have got."
"You have got to get us back; it is crazy." We received
recently 80 members of the 101st Airborne signed up in one letter.
Forty members from a helicopter assault squadron, crash and rescue
mission signed up in another one.

I think they are expressing, some
of these troops, solidarity with us, right now by wearing black
arm bands and Vietnam Veterans Against the War buttons. They want
to come out and I think they are looking at the people who want
to try to get them out as a help.

However, I do recognize there
are some men who are in the military for life. The job in the
military is to fight wars. When they have a war to fight, they
are just as happy in a sense, and I am sure that these men feel
they are being stabbed in the back. But, at the same time, I think
to most of them the realization of the emptiness, the hollowness,
the absurdity of Vietnam has finally hit home, and I feel is they
did come home the recrimination would certainly not come from
the right, from the military. I don't think there would be that
problem....

Editorial Note: Kerry returned to the theme of the mood
of troops in Vietnam and back home as he concluded his testimony.

...You see the mind is changing
over there and a search and destroy mission is a search and avoid
mission, and troops don't -- you know, like that revolt that took
place that was mentioned in the New York Times when they refused
to go in after a piece of dead machinery, because it doesn't have
any value. They are making their own judgments.

There is a GI movement in this
country now as well as over there, and soon these people, these
men, who are prescribing wars for these young men to fight are
going to find out they are going to have to find some other men
to fight them because we are going to change prescriptions. They
are going to have to change doctors, because we are not going
to fight for them. that is what they are going to realize. There
is now a more militant attitude even within the military itself....

Editorial Note: Later as Democratic senator from Massachusetts,
John Kerry joined 61 others in favor of a nonbinding resolution
to lift the U.S. trade embargo against Vietnam. The original embargo
began against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1964 and extended
to the united Socialist Republic of Vietnam in April 1975. Following
the nonbinding senate resolution, President Clinton repealed the
embargo 4 February 1994.